Central Library at Night
Staff from the Seattle Public Library met with the Seattle City Council today to begin hashing out funding issues for SPL beginning in 2011.
All of us here at the library (full disclosure, I am a denizen) are very well aware of the the funding shortfalls in our budget; it’s costing us jobs (fortunately taken care of through attrition rather than lay-offs, but it’s pinching) and operating hours. Plus we get a week off, unpaid… again… Many city and county departments are doing the same thing. It’s also being felt in our collection development, meaning we don’t order as many titles, or as many copies of popular titles, as we would have prior to the economic downturn.
In doing a quick read it appears that there are a half-dozen or so proposals on the table and about all of them will require legislative action and a few will pit SPL’s funding against the needs/wants of other city departments. Not a pleasant position to be in.
Larry Lange at seattlepi.com sums it up pretty well:
Even with a $50.9-million budget this year, the system will have to lay off three staffers and has cut back hours at 15 branches to deal with a revenue shortfall.
This year’s capital budget for maintenance was cut 37 percent, and libraries are likely candidates for more spending reductions as the City deals with a general-fund budget revenue shortfall estimated at $121 million through 2012.
Read the rest of his article here, it’s a good overview.
The raw Statements of Legislative Intent (SLIs) aren’t exactly thrilling tales, but they are pretty enlightening reading. One thing that caught my eye, though, was a metric they are using; per capita cost. Read the rest of this entry »
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ruffled crow
